Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I thank members of the crossbench for their advocacy on these reforms in a broad sense and their contribution today. I just want to clarify a couple of things. People cannot buy nine vapes. If you look at the legislation, it says you will only be able to buy one month's supply, which, given that they're reusable, will generally be pods. So people cannot go in and buy nine vapes from a pharmacy. I need to dispel that. The member for Mackellar said that a couple of times.

I hear the disappointment from members of the crossbench, but let me just reiterate what we have done here. We came to this area saying we intended to wipe out recreational vaping, but we intended to allow genuine therapeutic access to vapes that were not just sort of flooding into this country with who knows what in them and a variety of levels of nicotine. To be sold, a vape must not be disposable and must comply with standards that have been put in place in March by the TGA around nicotine content and content for a range of other chemicals. They must have a permit from the Office of Drug Control.

So this is a very different situation to the one we faced only a few months ago. Already we have seized more than 2½ million disposable vapes at the border. We are already starting to choke off supply. These measures, the third wave of our reforms, if they pass the House today, will see these vape stores that have deliberately opened up down the road from schools start to shut down. There is no change to our intention to wipe out the retail element of this market and the recreational vaping market in broad terms.

There are different views about whether a schedule 3 medicine is a therapeutic pathway. I disagree with members of the crossbench who imply at the very least that a schedule 3 pathway is not consistent with our view about this being a therapeutic good. This is not retail supply. This is not, in contrast to the member for Warringah's description, making pharmacists tobacconists. Using that language, frankly, is quite misleading. There is no suggestion that pharmacists would ever be able to supply tobacco or stock tobacco.

As to consultation, and the Senate debate I heard: there have been Senate committee inquiries here, and everybody, including the pharmacists' business lobby, has been able to participate in those inquiries. They've been in the corridors meeting with crossbenchers in the other place. I heard in the debate yesterday that one of the suggestions from that group was that this be a schedule 2, not a schedule 3—so it would be available over the counter, taken off the shelf, provided to the pharmacy assistant or retail assistant. That is very different to what is before the House right now. This requires a conversation with a qualified health professional. It is a pharmacist. It is the same discussion you would have to access the morning-after pill, a range of serious asthma medicines, pseudoephedrine and a range of things like that. I reject the idea this is some retail model. This is a therapeutic model. It might not be model the crossbench likes or the model that was in the original bill but it is still very much a therapeutic model. The Pharmaceutical Society of Australia—not the business group but the professional body for pharmacists—has said, as it should, that if this legislation passes it will work with the government to update its clinical practice guidelines. Pharmacists have been having these discussions for years with their patients and customers. They provide a whole range of other smoking cessation supports and nicotine replacement therapies, as particularly the doctors on the crossbench understand very well.

I understand the disappointment from those in this place and outside who would like to see the bill retained in its original form—that it would be a doctor or nurse practitioner prescription only model. This was an alternative pathway that had been discussed openly by health ministers over the last 12 months who were concerned about access issues; the member for Kooyong rightly raised them. There are difficulties getting in to see a GP not just in rural and regional Australia but in many cities as well. These are fine questions of balance. I accept reasonable people who come to this debate with goodwill can disagree, but I reject any idea that the amendments before the House now are anything other than consistent with our intention to provide only a therapeutic pathway to these goods.

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